I should have posted this back when it happened, but I seem to have let it slip. An article in the Merc has some information on Agami going bust. I had seen “Scalable Storage Systems” announce its existence, but hadn’t heard details. And for some strange reason, I never looked into why Agami wasn’t there … Read moreAgami has left the building

John West at InsideHPC.com pointed to an article at Barron’s about SGI. Before I get into this, I want to note that I had wondered whether or not we would continue to see (massive) oscillations in the market, as it effectively dissipated valuation, or if it would start tending towards an asymptotic lower limit … testing the bottom as it were. It seems that the forces that are driving the economy are continuing to drive valuation out of the market.
This makes it hard for any company to do well. News across the board are significant job cuts ahead of a confirmed recession (e.g. traditional definition of two quarters of negative GDP growth can’t be determined until well after the fact). Sadly this will definitely result in a deeper recession, as spending comes to a grinding halt, people are cut from payrolls, and banks are so averse to risk as to not grant new credit. This is the world in which we find ourselves. It is in this world that companies have to make some incredibly difficult choices going forward to survive and thrive.

and some tweaking of the installed kernel source (strange, it wasn’t ‘make prepare’ ed already)
[update] nope … but I understand the cause. The build machine has a different compiler than the target machine. As a result, the compiler on the target machine generates subtly different kernel modules than that of the build machine. And they disagree on the version of struct_module. The kernel module is not insertable.

(channeling Steve Martin in “The Jerk” when talking about the new phonebooks …) 40 Gb ports. $400/port or so. See InsideHPC.com for more. For any Voltaire folks reading this, feel free to fire over a loaner QDR switch and pair of cards. We would love to see if the pair of JackRabbits we are finishing … Read moreQDR switches are here, QDR switches are here!

HPC in general has demonstrated time and again that it provides value in up and down markets. The real value of being able to get (even approximate) answers to “what-if” questions has not been accurately measured or accounted for. Moreover, much engineering and R&D work depends critically upon simulation.
I expect companies to be far more frugal with new acquisitions, and want to focus upon getting more value and work out of their existing systems. Moreover, I expect that technologies and processes that lower barriers to getting computing cycles inexpensively will be on the upswing.
That is the bottom line. How this is going to unfold will be interesting to watch.

The John’s (West and Leidel) at InsideHPC.com did a nice study on personal supercomputing at the site. It is worth a read.
In short, they found people would find such boxen useful. But they don’t want to spend more than $10k for them.
This is interesting at many levels. Matches up very well with informal/anecdotal data we have from conversations with users.

Yes folks, thats right. Everything I now write for the [insert cluster distribution list] will be moderated, or more likely, simply discarded. I guess people don’t quite know how to treat their friends and supporters. I need to seriously rethink writing articles like this in the future. Go figure.